Will Boris Johnson and Jeremy Clarkson now take the climate crisis seriously? They owe us an apology

There was bad weather, apparently, in 1911. A man called Francis Molena wrote about it in a journal called Popular Mechanics. It included a picture caption that was reprinted as a short news article in many newspapers.

“The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year,” Mr Molena wrote. “When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the Earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.”

If he’s completely honest with himself, Mr Molena wasn’t really doing too much by way of original research. It had been fully 15 years before that the term “greenhouse gases” is first meant to have been used, by a Swedish scientist called Svante Arrhenius.

There was never a time that humanity was clever enough to extract magical black fuels from deep within the earth, then set them on fire, then see, smell and taste their terrifying toxicity, and be simultaneously stupid enough not to wonder about whether there might be downsides.

We’ve known. We’ve always known. And though there are many contenders – that, arguably, is the most depressing aspect of the latest, and by far the worst, report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It speaks of certain decline for 30 years. More fires, more floods, but the possibility that things could stabilise, at whatever grim level they might reach, so long as we act now.

It’s “certain”, they say, that the unprecedented scale of global heating has been caused by humanity. Which, again, we’ve always known.

The time to act is now. But the time to act has always been now. There will, over the next decades, certainly be investigations into exactly how so little was done, until after the point at which it became too late. The fact that they will not have to work very hard to see is that people simply did not want to act.

There is a sense that the publication of this report marks the passing of the baton from Covid to the climate crisis, just as the first case of Covid in the UK was recorded on the day the UK left the European Union, and as always the same people are lined up on the wrong side of the argument. One of the more egregious routines Boris Johnson has recently added to his stock set is a joke about how, 20 years ago, people warned that “wind turbines couldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding”, which he knows is a joke at his own expense, it being him that wrote these words in the Daily Telegraph in 2001.

He takes the climate crisis seriously now, naturally, it’s just that it’s too late. On a crunched but fundamentally identical timeline, he was forced to take Covid-19 seriously in much the same way.

Jeremy Clarkson recently decided the climate crisis was real when he took a boat ride up the Mekong River Delta and found there to be a distinct lack of river there. But watch, if you dare, the Top Gear special, broadcast by the BBC in the ancient, historic year of 2007, in which Clarkson and James May drive an SUV to the North Pole. It is nothing short of a paean to climate change denialism – and this on the BBC’s most watched show around the world.

There’s Clarkson at the start, laughing off the suggestion they could ever be attacked by a polar bear, because they’ve all drowned and died, according to that well known lefty, the Texan oil multimillionaire turned actual US president, George W Bush. Later, the car almost falls through an ice sheet that’s several times thinner that it should be at that time of year, but that isn’t sufficient to prevent Clarkson concluding the programme, watched by tens of millions, quite possibly even hundreds of millions of people, all around the world, with the line: “The inconvenient truth is, there is no inconvenient truth. We haven’t even scratched the surface.”

At this moment of great emergency, we are led to believe there are new technologies ready to come on stream. Carbon neutral aviation fuels, electric cars, collagen scaffolds on which real zero-carbon meat might be grown. But all these grand innovations will certainly arrive too late for the worst of the harms to be avoided.

This moment of emergency could have been called any time in the last 40 years. It has come to pass now only because the evidence is sufficient to overwhelm the usual stubborn fools whose lot in life is to always be wrong about everything, issue some kind of personal mea culpa far beyond the point at which it is too late, and then move on to the next thing to be wrong about.

If there is to be any chance of change for the better in the crucial years to come, it should start with a clear and certain realisation that the Boris Johnsons of the world, the Clarksons and all the dismal rest of them have nothing of any use to say or to contribute.

The future is already made worse because of them. Their time is up. It is time to listen only to the people who’ve been calling it absolutely right for well over a century, and to apologise to our children for not doing it sooner. Not that they are likely to forgive us.